Connect with us —

TwentyFourteen: A New Default WordPress Theme

January 16, 2014

With the release of WordPress version 3.8, we also got a new default theme. This theme was based on the theme Further, which was a premium theme on wordpress.com and is now available to everyone as a default theme at no cost. Let’s take a closer look at this new theme and its possibilities.

It seems there is a new approach to default themes. Twenty Twelve and previous default themes were basic themes and could be used as blogs or business sites. They made great parent themes. However with TwentyThirteen we saw a theme made specifically for blogging and now with TwentyFourteen we get a magazine style theme. I think what this really shows is that WordPress is comfortable in many situations.

Let’s look at some of the features of TwentyFourteen. It has a featured content section which has 2 layouts. You can set it to grid or slider in the theme customizer. Then, to add posts to be featured you just need to add the tag( “Featured” by default ). That can be changed in the customizer as well.

This theme also has a Contributor page template that can be used to show off all the authors on your site with a small excerpt about the author. This is a good way for people to get to know the author a bit more and find other articles they have written.

The theme also allows featured images to shine even if they are not featured. It shows them on archive pages and in the single view. The theme has a pattern that shows if there is no featured image, which will encourage more people to set featured images.

TwentyFourteen should open up a lot of possibilities for WordPress users. A big thanks to Lance and the other contributors who helped make this theme evolve from Further into TwentyFourteen.

In addition to TwentyFourteen

I just found out about this plugin that I think is really cool. It allows you to change the color scheme of the theme without a child theme. So after you check out TwentyFourteen go check out Fourteen Colors.